Green

As if the plunging price of oil were not enough to doom the market for electric and hybrid automobiles, there is this from ABC News:

People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier, worsening global warming. Ethanol isn't so green, either.

"It's kind of hard to beat gasoline" for public and environmental health, said study co-author Julian Marshall, an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota. "A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean ... are not better than gasoline.”

There is, however, some good news for environmentalists in the oil glut. It may be the last nail in the coffin of the Keystone Pipeline. As Politico reports:

The same collapse in oil prices that is pumping dollars into motorists’ wallets also risks undermining the case for building the 1,179-mile pipeline in two crucial ways: It’s squeezing the western Canadian oil industry that has looked to Keystone as its most promising route to the Gulf Coast. And anti-pipeline activists hope that falling prices will make it politically safer for Obama to reject the project, despite the new Republican Congress’ pledges to put Keystone at the top of its 2015 energy agenda.

What we usually hear about when the subject is climate change is stuff meant to scare you out of your socks. Rising oceans, violent storms, draughts, famines, plagues of locusts … and so forth. The implied alternative is austerity so severe – no cars, rationed electricity, smaller houses, once-a-week cold showers, etc.

The past two weeks have been filled with stories of government offices, agencies, services, workers, monuments, websites, memorials, and parks that have been closed, suspended, furloughed, and even barricaded.

A "Green Inaugural Ball" has been scheduled to celebrate President Barack Obama's second inauguration, according to an invitation of the event. The ball will be held January 20, the day of Obama's second inauguration, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C.

According to Bloomberg, the heavily subsidized battery maker, A 123, has filed for bankruptcy protection, making it the latest in a long line of green failures that have produced very little renewable energy and very heavy losses for the American taxpayer. Been good for the bankruptcy lawyers, though.

The Los Angeles Times reports that, “A reusable grocery bag left in a hotel bathroom caused an outbreak of norovirus-induced diarrhea and nausea that struck nine of 13 members of a girls' soccer team in October 201

But what is ecocide, precisely? Practically any business activity that environmentalists loathe, from large scale resource development to nonrenewable energy generation, along with any accidental ecological disaster would potentially qualify as a crime against peace. As envisioned by ecocide’s rising star, Polly Higgins, who recently addressed the United Nations promoting a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, the This Is Ecocide website states: